Peter Walker - a personal reflection

The Crown, Lime Street, Liverpool

I was a student at Padgate College in Warrington in the 1970s. The area at that time had three breweries: Burtonwood, Greenall and Tetley, although you wouldn't have known it because the vast majority of pubs were Greenall's. The brewery's adverts told us to, "Smile please, you're in Greenall Whitley land". They produced funny beer mats and even 'GWL' car stickers, like the 'GB' plate you use when driving abroad. I sometimes used to wonder whether they had ever caused any confusion at border checks on the continent. If only they had put as much effort into the beer as they did into the hype because, at best, Greenall's beers were mediocre.

I don't recall any Burtonwood pubs in the town, and most of the few non-Greenall pubs were Tetley. Tetley's beers were better than Greenall's but not by a great margin. Tetley had merged with Peter Walker in 1960, and in the 70s, they were still brewing the old Walker's Bitter, although they sold it under the Tetley name, which I found slightly odd seeing that most beer drinkers I knew preferred the Walker's Bitter to the Tetley's. The local CAMRA branch produced stickers for the few pubs that still sold Walker's to put in their windows, something my friends and I found very useful.

I had a sort of family connection to Walker's because my maternal grandmother had worked in Walker pubs for many years, as did her son, my Uncle Bernard. He rose to be manager of several pubs, and I can remember visiting two as a child, the Sefton Arms in Croxteth and the Victoria in Bootle. My grandmother used to be his relief manager on his day off. I remember calling into the Victoria for a pint a couple of times when I was older and working in Bootle; he was rightly proud of the quality of his beers. In later years, knowing about my involvement with CAMRA, he was pleased when I told him that he had kept an excellent pint.

At some point in the 1980s, Tetley Walker decided to relaunch the Walker brand. Some Tetley pubs were re-badged as Walker's and new beers formulated. In the process they scrapped the old Walker's recipe, which had been around 3.5%, like many beers at the time, and replaced it with Best Bitter (3.5%), Bitter (3.3%), and an even weaker mild. The beers weren't bad but I preferred the old brew. Later added to the range was a stronger Warrington Ale and a Winter Warmer, both of which I did quite like.

The 3.3% strength of the new Walker's Bitter became something of a joke in Liverpool:
Policeman: "Excuse me sir, have you been drinking?"
Driver: "Yes, officer, Walker's Bitter."
Policeman: "Very good, sir, carry on."

Walker's beers are no more, possibly disappearing around the time of the 1989 Beer Orders, but the name can still be seen on quite a few pubs in Merseyside, as shown in the photographs which I took in Liverpool yesterday.

The Vines, Lime Street, Liverpool

P.S. Since I posted this less than an hour ago, it has correctly been pointed out to me that someone is brewing a smoothflow version of Walker's Bitter, although I've no idea who or where. When saying that Walker's beers were long gone, I was thinking of the Warrington-brewed beers. Anything else would be a poor facsimile just to cash in on the name.

Tetley's Returns to Leeds

Mike Perkins in front of Tetley's Brewery
before closure (photo: Ms Sam Thomas)

In June 2011, the iconic Tetley's Brewery in Leeds was closed by its owner, Carlsberg, thus bringing 189 years of brewing history to an end. The production of Tetley's Bitter, once the best-selling real ale in the UK, was moved to Banks's Brewery in Wolverhampton. A few months earlier, CAMRA's Southport and District Branch had visited the brewery while they still could - a trip suggested by Mike Perkins, a proud Yorkshireman and my predecessor in writing this column (in the local papers). I wrote about the CAMRA trip and the brewery closure here.

Surprisingly, Tetley's beers are to be brewed again in Leeds. No 3 Pale Ale will be based on a recipe from the Tetley’s beer 200-year old archive. The beer will be brewed by Leeds Brewery in partnership with Tetley's. At first it will be available in the Leeds area, but they intend to distribute it nationwide in the future.

The new beer is based on a recipe that was originally brewed between 1848 and 1868. Sam Moss, who founded the Leeds Brewery in 2007, said: “Joshua Tetley himself died in 1859, so there is every chance he would have drunk the very beer this recipe is based upon.”

While the original Tetley's Bitter will still be brewed in Wolverhampton, there are plans for other beers derived from recipes from the archive to be brewed by Leeds Brewery.

Emily Hudson from Tetley's said: “We felt it was a fantastic opportunity to team up with Leeds Brewery – one of the region’s leading brewers – to recreate the recipe within a mile of where it would have originally been brewed 150 years ago.”

It is unusual for a large company like Carlsberg to recreate beers from its archives and, recognising the increasing importance of provenance in the beer world, brewing them in the city where the brand originated. It makes a change after decades of beer production being centralised, often far from where the brands originated. Big breweries trying to garner some real ale credibility have in recent years preferred to take over an existing small brewery, such as SABMiller buying Meantime and Molson Coors acquiring Sharp's.

Locally Tetley's was once very popular: the only real ales the Cheshire Lines used to sell were Tetley's Bitter and Mild, kept to a standard that ensured the pub a place in CAMRA's Good Beer Guide. 

I'll give these beers a try if they appear locally.

Apart from the text in italics which I added later, this is one of a series of articles that I write for the CAMRA column in our local papers, the Southport Visiter and Ormskirk Advertiser. Some previous reviews are here.

Music at the Mount Pleasant

I have been reminded by Jo, who runs the Mount Pleasant in Southport, that they have live bands every Saturday.  I have reported on these before, but inconsistently; I'll try to do better.  The Mount is a large suburban pub with a nice little conservatory to the side, a separate bar, and a function rooms upstairs where I have been to a few music nights, performing myself occasionally.

The pub used to be run by Matthew Brown, a Backburn brewery that was taken over by Scottish and Newcastle in 1987.  I remember walking into the Mount one evening when the conservatory was being officially opened to be presented with a glass of wine by the brewery beauty queen, Miss Matthew Brown, who was well deserving of her title.  A bit later I wandered on to the Guest House where I was given a free pint to celebrate the pub's redecoration, although after that my run of free booze ran out.  Matthew Brown beers were called Lion Ales, named after the brewery, and the old Lion Ales windows are still there.

Tonight the band is the Re-sessions, who will be playing downstairs from 9.00 p.m.  The Mount serves real Tetley Bitter. Join 'em.

Farmers Club award

Last week, our local CAMRA branch caught the bus to Ormskirk to present the Lancashire Pub of the Year award to the Farmers Club in Burscough Street.  This unusual colonnaded building was built in 1830 as a dispensary, and operated as such until the opening of the local cottage hospital.  It became the Farmers Club in 1898, so the club has quite a history.  When we arrived, we noticed that the A-board was already proudly proclaiming the club's new status. The front doors open into a foyer that houses a full-size snooker table (which you can just make out in the picture below) and has a raised glass ceiling, with the bar to the left and a seating area with dart board to the right. It is an in interesting place, which I'd never heard of previously, even though I lived near Ormskirk for a few years.  Our chair, Ian Garner, presented Elaine Gore, the Club Manager for more than 20 years, with her award, and complimented the club for having such an individual building and for serving real ale. The beers that were on were Tetley Bitter and a changing guest, which happened to be a Tetley seasonal, Midsummer Madness - nothing special, perhaps, but apparently what the club's members like.

Goodbye Tetley's

The brewery on 30 October 2010.

Last Friday, 17 June, saw the Tetley brewery in Leeds close for the last time.  The local branch of CAMRA (the Campaign for Real Ale) held a silent vigil at midday on Saturday to mark the end of a brewery that has been associated with Leeds in much the same way that a certain brown ale has been with Newcastle.

Joshua Tetley established his brewery on this site in 1822, so the closure brings 189 years of brewing history to an end.  In a way, even longer as the Tetley brewery replaced a previous brewery on the same site dating from the late 18th century.  Carlsberg UK, owners of Tetley's, said that the beer market faces the "perfect storm of falling consumption, increasing costs and rising tax", leading to over-capacity in the brewing industry, which had rendered the brewery uneconomical.  Although cynics might point to the value of the large piece of land that the brewery was sitting on in the centre of Leeds, the truth probably combines both reasons.  Tetley isn't my cup of tea, and if I'm in a pub serving Tetley real ales, I prefer the mild to the bitter, except that, unfortunately, a lot of pubs serving Tetley's have put the mild on smoothflow. 

Southport CAMRA visited the brewery on 30 October last year, and I asked our guides whether they had a lot of brewery trips.  I was very surprised to be told that this was the first one in 2010; the previous one had been in summer 2009.  Most of Southport CAMRA’s trips tend to be to smallish regional breweries or microbreweries, so going around an enormous beer factory was something very different.  The processes were essentially the same, but on a far greater scale, and in this case, automated.  Computers controlled much of the brewing and we were shown a control room that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the Starship Enterprise.  Part of the brewing process was done in vessels called ‘coppers’, which used to be made out of copper, but are now made of stainless steel.  The last actual copper was still there; it dated from 1966, and had a plaque commemorating that it was last of its type to be installed by the manufacturer.

The brewery was on its annual shutdown, so not much was happening, but we were still taken around the brew house, fermenting room with the famous Yorkshire squares (actually oblong), boardrooms, and the bottling and canning plant.  It was very quiet, whereas normally we would have had to wear ear protection for much of the tour.  What struck me was, although the production rooms were huge, how few people were needed actually to operate it all.  Altogether, only about 150 people worked on the entire site. 

At one point we were taken through what I assumed was the old entrance foyer, sumptuously fitted with wood-panelled walls, a grandfather clock (still working), old-fashioned office furniture, an old rotating door and a caged lift.  It was beautiful and looked like a hotel foyer from ‘Jeeves and Wooster’.  We were also taken through what had once been offices, again with wood-panelled walls, and a low wooden railing, but otherwise empty.  I hope none of it is dumped in skips now the brewery has closed.

Tetley Bitter is still the second biggest selling real ale in the UK, so it won't be disappearing:  brewing of cask Tetley's will move to the Midlands while the smoothflow will be brewed in Tadcaster, North Yorkshire.  Carlsberg UK said that “The brewery may be closing but we are keeping some of the site open and have managed to secure the future of 114 Carlsberg UK employees in Leeds. They are mainly based in the telesales and credit control functions in Tetley House.”  I could be wrong, but I suspect that such jobs, welcome as they no doubt are to the individuals concerned, are something of a let-down after working in the brewery.

Although I wasn't a fan of Tetley's, I'd have preferred them to brew more interesting beers, which they had begun doing with seasonal specials, rather than close down.  The government should (but almost certainly won't) note that ever-increasing beer tax was one of the reasons given for the closure of this historic brewery. 

Photo by Ms Sam Thomas, taken on our CAMRA trip to the brewery.

Ale & Hearty - my 3rd issue

The Winter issue of our local CAMRA magazine Ale & Hearty, the third that I have edited, has recently been published. I am now learning the problems of taking on such a venture. People promise articles that don't turn up, so you have to write things at short notice to plug the gap. What I sometimes do is raid this blog to see if there is anything that I can adapt (there usually is); on the other hand, I have used in this blog one or two articles I wrote for A&H, but only after the mag is published. I don't think there is much overlap of readers, but if it was written for the mag, that's where it should appear first.

When taking over, I was warned against using pictures of local pubs on the cover, otherwise other licensees begin asking why it wasn't their pub. This at first seemed a strange constraint on a CAMRA publication, but I soon twigged that pictures of pubs aren't excluded: licensees that advertise with us put pictures of their pubs in their own adverts, so you can still see the range of good looking pubs in this area in every edition, and all of them pubs whose support helps keep the mag going. This can however make the question of what to put on the cover difficult. I had an idea last night in the Guest House while supping Everards Sleighbell: have pictures of views from pubs. With the range of pubs in our area - town centre, suburban, country, canalside, even seaside - that should keep me in cover pictures for a while.

So what have I changed since taking over? It's now officially a magazine, not a newsletter, and the title is in a much simpler and bolder font. I have ditched the Southport coat of arms, as we now cover most of West Lancashire and Formby as well as Southport. The political content (in relation to pub and beer related matters) is more overt ~ as a former union rep, I'm used to giving it straight. I've begun a couple of new series, such as pub crawls easily accessible by public transport, and relics of old breweries in pubs, and my friends Carole and Ian (aka Ale Ian), have written cheerful items about their beery adventures elsewhere in England. My articles on Real Ale & Real Music in pubs began under the previous editor Mike Hoey's stewardship. Old regular features still appear, such as Dave Williams' Classic Pubs of the UK and A. L. Guzzler's humorous view of the world. So it's not all change.

I was quite pleased with my article on a trip to Tetley's brewery in Leeds that we went on in November; as you'll know, the brewery will close next year. I went on the trip, despite not liking Tetley's much (although you wouldn't know that from the article) because it is a shame such an historical brewery, founded in 1822, is closing. I decided a photo of the brewery featuring CAMRA Branch stalwart, Mike Perkins who himself hails from Leeds, was a perfect cover picture. It was a very interesting day, with some nice pints in Keighley on the way back.

Now I'd better begin thinking about the Spring edition. It seems like back to square one each time!

Jazz nights move to the Shrimper

I have learned that the jazz nights at the Richmond have moved to the Shrimper in Fylde Road (PR9 9XP).  You can find details of forthcoming bands here, and I'll go on putting them in the What's On column to the left.  I've no idea why they have moved, but this jazz club does seem to lead a peripatetic existence; I think it's been based in the Hesketh and the Albert prior to the Richmond.  The Shrimper serves a well-kept pint of Tetley cask bitter, and good value food too.

We're on the move...

The announcement that Newcastle Brown Ale production is to be transferred to the John Smith's brewery in Tadcaster will no doubt cause a lot of dismay in the North East. It seems bizarre that a beer that is so closely associated with Geordie Land will now come from Yorkshire, but regrettably such moves are nothing new. Geordies will already have seen production move to Gateshead in 2005, but at least they could console themselves that it was in the same area, cross-Tyne rivalry notwithstanding. Newcastle Brown isn't a real ale, of course, and has been for me a beer to fall back upon - along with Guinness - if I found myself in a pub or bar with no real ale, but I suspect a lot of people will be upset on Tyneside.

At the CAMRA conference in Eastbourne this year, delegates from Leeds were genuinely mourning the announcement of the closure of the Tetley Brewery, with production due to be transferred to Northampton. Tetley used to be brewed in Warrington as well, and drinkers who regarded themselves as discerning always claimed that it wasn't as good as the Leeds Tetley. I have to admit that the two brews tasted very similar to me, with the Leeds version sometimes having a slight edge, perhaps, but I did feel that when the Warrington brewery was closed down and production moved to Leeds, the taste of Tetley Bitter declined so that - in my view - it was far worse than both previous versions. I will try the Northampton Tetley when it becomes available with interest, but I don't expect any improvement. At the Southport Beer Festival, you could actually get Tetley Bitter free using tokens printed in the local paper. Despite this, Tetley Bitter was the only cask with any substantial amount of beer left. It says it all, really ~ you can't even give it away.

The most notorious example locally of wandering beer was of course Higson's of Liverpool. The brewery was taken over by Boddington's of Manchester in 1985. They sold it to Whitbread in 1990, who closed it shortly afterwards. Production was moved the Hillsborough brewery in Sheffield and, when that closed, to Castle Eden in County Durham ~ a long way from its Merseyside origins. Production finally ceased in 1999, by which time the beer bore absolutely no resemblance to the original.

There are many more examples. Some drinkers, myself among them, believe that Young's beers have suffered from the move from the historic Ram brewery in Wandsworth after the merger with Wells. Other examples of peripatetic beers  include Ruddles, Old Speckled Hen, Ind Coope Burton, Bass, Courage Directors ~ the list goes on. While some of these are still drinkable, none is as good as (and often bears little resemblance to) its original form. In fact, I can't think of any beer from a big brewery that has been uprooted and moved elsewhere without a loss in quality. Geordies should enjoy their brew before its taste wanders into history.

As a footnote, after the failure of the recent relaunch of Higson’s, drinkers who remember the original with fondness may wish to know that the Liverpool Organic Brewery is working on a new Higson's brew.

Beers in Liverpool & Churchtown

I was in Liverpool for a meeting yesterday and, having an hour to spare, decided to visit a couple of pubs, as you do. First was the Globe opposite Central Station. There was steady late afternoon custom with locals mostly, and a nice comfortable atmosphere ~ I have written about this great pub before. There were four beers on: Copper Dragon Challenger IPA, Sharps Cornish Coaster, bitters from Cain’s & Black Sheep and Weston's Scrumpy. I had the Sharps, as it's the only one I hadn't tried before. A pleasant 3.6% beer, light in colour and flavour. While I quite liked it, it's not one I would seek out. I do like Copper Dragon IPA, but had decided to move on.

I next went to the Swan in Wood Street, a rock pub since the 1970s. It's actually an unremarkable pub when not busy, as on this occasion, but has tremendous atmosphere later in the evening when it's busy and the juke box is blaring out. When I arrived Ozzy Osbourne was singing "So Tired" on the jukebox, which then fell silent. Seven of the nine hand pumps were on with 6 beers and Weston's Scrumpy; several of the beers were unfamiliar to me. I tried Cottage Fifteen Guinea Special, another light coloured beer, but at 4.7% with more body than the Sharps: I quite liked it but thought it needed to be cooler. However, I'd suggest visiting this pub when it's rocking, later in the evening.

After the meeting, I caught the train to Southport and then the bus to Churchtown, a picturesque urban village north of the town centre. I was going to a CAMRA meeting in the Bold Arms (pictured), which is an old pub going back around 400 years, if not more; it has 4 or 5 drinking areas, with various nooks and crannies. In addition to Tetley Bitter and Mild, there were two guests: Celt Native Storm 4.4% and Wooden Hand Brixham Buccaneer 4.3%. The Wooden Hand was not bad, but I much preferred the Celt, a nice light-coloured, full-flavoured beer, dry but not astringent.

I don't get to the Bold that often as it's out of my way, but the beers I tried were on good form. Although I didn't try it, Tetley Mild features here, a beer that is becoming harder to find and which is - in my opinion - much better than Tetley Bitter.

All in all, a pleasant little exploration of pubs and beers in two quite separate parts of Merseyside.